So, this episode was a bit of an experiment for all of us. We wanted to switch things up, but without messing up the flow that you're used to. Usually, when a term or stat comes up in the episode, we break it down within the episode. This time, we thought, why not just go find the stat instead? So, we sat down with a few founders in the travel space right now, got them talking about what worked, what didn't, and what they would do differently. So we have kind of woven bits and pieces of it so you guys have real context instead of just explaining things to you. But if you want to dig deeper, get more insight on the data, the timestamps, the references, whatnot, all of it is going to be attached in a document below. So yeah, new format, new experiment. We hope you guys like it and let us know if you do. It's okay if you don't also. It's fine. We don't need to know. It's okay.
We have like three questions left. Yeah. Okay. So, I'm just going to ask you like random questions to just break the ice so that you feel more comfortable and then we'll get into it.
Sorry, I was looking there. Can't wait. I'm very curious.
So, how would people describe you?
Good question. I think maybe a simple, honest man, passionate, perseverant, never ever give up.
And how long have you been in this industry?
In this travel and tourism industry, about 26 years.
45 years, including hotel school.
If someone who's in their 20s and 30s, where would you tell them to travel?
Travel wherever your heart and your wallet takes you, but don't stop traveling.
Wow. Let's start with your stories.
And would you do it again in terms of travel?
Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah. I'm super excited about doing this every day.
Travel is so liberating. Um, I think we've only scratched the surface.
For a youngster, for a 25-year-old, because he doesn't have the capital required to build an asset, maybe an asset-light hotel brand can be built on the back of content.
How far is Puneet? So I want to see if we can actually—we are starting early. He's coming on time only.
Yeah, yeah, he's coming on time. He said 2:30.
Yeah, they have gone down to get him. Are you friends with him already?
No, with Puneet? Yeah, of course, of course. He's our partner, no? He is one of our top hotel partners. Yeah, yeah, I know Puneet. Puneet came from Germany to take this job.
From Germany? What was he doing there?
He was in Frankfurt. He was working there. He'll tell you more about it. But ever since he's come on board, we've been working together. We work with every hotel partner right now thanks to our model. But even during COVID, the partnership became very strong because he's also one of those who wants to do not necessarily only for IHCL, but also for the industry. So just coming together and trying to do more for the industry all the time. He's part of every association and stuff like that. So that way, pretty close partner actually.
Now these guys, all the hotel—what's happening with OYO?
Pivot is working. At least on the face of it, when you look at the numbers, it is working.
What percentage of your business is India bookings versus outside?
So in bookings, Indians booking on our platform is 95%. So the main market is India only.
There you go. Hi. Hello, Nikhil. How's your day? For those who don't know you, state your name, role, and the company.
Hi, my name is Siddharth Gupta. I'm the co-founder and CEO at Treebo Hospitality Ventures.
Hi, my name is Amit Damani. I'm the co-founder of StayVista. StayVista is India's largest villa hospitality brand. We manage over 1,500 plus luxury villas across the country.
Sandhya Chandrasekharayya
5:30 ↗
My name is Sandhya Chandrasekharayya. I am a co-founder of Indiahikes. Indiahikes is India's largest trekking organization.
My name is Bhavik Bakshi. I am the co-founder of an invite-only travel club called Boheco Travels.
You can take off your jacket if you like. I'm totally fine. You want to mic him first?
Hoteliers always dress so well. I can see your logo on your shirt and all that. Now, you can take a break whenever you want.
Yeah, I know. It's a beautiful place. I've never been here before.
I've never been here. I mean, I looked at the terrace in the area itself, Pali Hill, only once eight years ago.
I've been here back in the days. My uncle used to live in Bandra on one of these 15th, 16th Streets.
I don't mind black coffee.
I'll have black coffee. Give me also one.
I'm looking for the place. Is it too noisy if you open this?
Yeah, it's nice. Weather's good.
You seem to have quite a name, huh?
Oh, I'm sorry. I was not in the country.
That's what I was just telling him, and he's waiting for you to tell him more.
Very good. They say like you did things on your own, but it was not like from day one you were cash positive, or I mean, what a story Zerodha is. What a story, what a story, because he must be playing on your platform.
He said it's a cycle, no? Good, bad, good, bad. Mathematically, maybe it's a bad thing. Sorry. Our CFO told me what Groww is doing now is inspired from what you have done and they followed them.
And of course, he had told me everything that you are the most famous Indian person who has done Elon Musk. We were just chatting about it and I'm saying, 'Why don't you join?' So I sent him—he said, 'You tell me and all,' so I sent him Elon Musk. He said, 'Please have a look and then you'll really grow.' And how do you know each other in the ecosystem?
Internet. You must be using MakeMyTrip, I hope so.
I've used it many times. I've stayed at Taj Hotels many times. I don't know who hasn't, but I have.
Let's start with your stories so we get a little context. So, we focus on everything a youngster needs to either start a business around his or your business or to find a job around your industries. So we look at trends, we look at patterns, we'll talk about what is growing at what pace, what industry will get disrupted where they can build early. So we largely focus on things like this. Our audience is largely entrepreneurs or wannabe businesses and relaxed line.
Totally, like it's not like a news show. You want to take a break, you want to do whatever we can do. Office.
You have to go. We opened a small boutique place called Bandra House on Turner Road.
Are boutique places really working?
You think they have mad potential?
They have mad potential. We just invested in a boutique hotel brand which is opening in Portugal, Dubai, Saudi. It's called Earth Hotels.
A new brand. It's in partnership with three Lebanese guys. It's us and them. We're opening five hotels in the next 18 months kind of thing. First one is almost open in Dubai, J1. Experiential hotels, 40–50 rooms hotel. This is 38 rooms.
But once you open, say we open five hotels in the next two years, won't it become like a large hotel anyway? How do you retain the boutique nature of something?
By not doing everything to get business. You just pick up good locations. So there has been a good boutique brand done by people of Indian origin, now sold to Marriott, called citizenM. citizenM did a good job. 25hours is very good. But they got very lucky with the start. So they started with Bikini Berlin with a Monkey Bar. So that Monkey Bar became more famous because it's overlooking the zoo. It's not normal seating; you have all these steps, Indian style ghats. So it did very well. And then nothing succeeds like success, like Mama Shelter. He actually modeled after citizenM and 25hours. I've stayed in citizenM; it is beautiful actually.
The concept—the other good thing about experiential also is you can leverage technology quite a bit.
citizenM also does it. You can bring in the touch and all, but you can also bring in better high-quality experience which is powered by technology.
And it's easier for people who are non-hoteliers.
So citizenM was started by a guy who sold Mexx to Liz Claiborne for whatever 800, 900 million pounds or a billion pounds. And then for his kids, he thought he'll do something, and he bought a yacht and this and that story.
Very interesting, but it's a very powerful point, by the way. I just wanted to build on this, that it is better built by non-hoteliers. Sometimes if you have to do an out-of-the-box thing, you don't have to get the same person from the industry there. So much of baggage, legacy, etc. I remember even in MakeMyTrip, when we were setting it up, none of us knew travel. Not even one person except one co-founder who had some travel background. Starting with Deep, me, Sachin, Keyur—Keyur was the only one who had some background. And our leadership team, even looking for the next level of talent when we were scaling up, we were not looking from travel. We were not looking for travel because in any case we were a tech-led business, but domain was not important, we realized, because then you get fresh perspective, out-of-the-box thinking, and stuff. All right.
Maybe so our audience gets a little context of—I don't know why I'm speaking more Hindi today. Maybe because you're from Delhi, Bombay. After you. All right, okay. So let's talk about it. It takes too much time to already pull. So...
It actually happened when we were on a panel together.
Okay. I don't think you found anyone in the morning. No, it's not right. No, it's not real. At least I didn't realize it was. I thought a hotel will list on everything. Yeah. If you are on MMT, you won't be on Booking.
It does matter because a lot of our offers are going through them. We have not done any special campaign with Booking or with Expedia.
So you're saying where you discount, people will take from there?
No discount. Whatever kind of deal we do, a special one...
I guess it's also a function of market focus and the power of the brand, right? So let's say, in comparison, if you look at any brand in any category, if you're looking at a particular online platform or brand which has built significant traffic and traction, and the ROI spending or investing on that brand will be higher, so they end up just doing it there relatively speaking. I'm just very dispassionately speaking. Otherwise, you're right, the inventory will theoretically speaking be everywhere.
And you go to Taj and crack these deals with...
It's actually much more than that. So what happens in a close partnership, which Puneet was alluding to, is that both the respective teams, actually almost thinking that this is our own channel, start to look at a lot of the data and then based on that react, which is like almost day-to-day engagement. So there will be a tiny group on that side, there will be a tiny group on our side working very closely hotel by hotel. Many examples. Now let's say a new property—we were just in the morning talking about a new hotel that has come up in Frankfurt, for example. So we were talking about how do we now get traction from MakeMyTrip for Frankfurt for international traffic growing in India. And then you start to figure out, because see, we also on our platform—and pretty much every e-commerce platform would have many properties that you would have built just to, of course, from the demand side, keep getting customers, and from a brand perspective, that you have more than one product offering to offer, including the brand store, including sponsored listing versus non-sponsored listing, etc. Of course, all of that comes with investment, but it's like a very close relationship.
So, they give a deal on MMT. In return for that, you pay them money.
No, we don't pay them money. No, that was half joking.
Do you buy rooms and then resell?
In airline tickets, that happens. They call it aggregation.
I'll tell you where it happens. You can pre-buy during season and all in pockets. So let's say early days MakeMyTrip would buy for our packages business where you have to bundle it together, right? But for a large part of our business—so we have a packages unit where we would, in season where there will be short inventory, end up sort of buying. Over time, when you have reached the scale and size, you don't actually have to upfront buy everything.
Do your margins go up if you upfront buy?
They do, they do, they do.
Significantly for tickets and hotels?
Both sides you're putting money on the table because there's risk, right, because then you carry that inventory.
Because it's not sustainable, because it also comes with inventory carrying headache, right? Because at scale, it'll be very hard for you to do it if it doesn't happen, right? It's a classical inventory model even in the other categories versus allocation model. And especially when you have reached a scale and size, if you get soft blocks as we call it, which means that I will have that commitment, but I don't have to write a 100% upfront check because I have delivered historically, then I don't really have to block the capital.
And that's true for airline tickets and hotel rooms?
Both, both, both. Any product.
Competition, and what scale are they at?
So when you look at the India market, our competition—the overall travel and tourism market distribution channels will be online, which is like the online travel agency model like ours, and then there will be offline: tour operators, corporate travel agencies, traditional travel agents. Theoretically, everybody is competition, right, because everybody is selling in the market. But in the online market, our competition will be online travel agencies: Cleartrip, Booking.com, Agoda, Yatra. In the air market, I think it'll be a toss between—earlier it used to be Yatra, but it keeps changing, maybe Cleartrip and Yatra together bracketed. For our total market share for domestic air segments, it will be about 30%, and they might be single-digit, high single-digit, that kind of stuff. And then the rest of it is really long tail.
Whenever I book a hotel, I have somehow come to terms with the fact that if I go to the hotel website directly, I get the best deal. How do you compete with that? Like if I go to Taj website...
You only get Taj. When you go to our website, you get all possible choices.
But I can go to their website, look at which hotel, then go to the hotel website directly and book.
Yeah. Usually there is rate parity. It's not that we have cheaper, but the best deals are available on the hotel website.
They are, right? So you are smart, others are not. Rate parity came up on the show, and the admission was that the best deals sit on the hotel's own website, not the aggregators. You are on both sides of it: StayVista.com and also listed on the big platforms. What share of your nights come through someone else's app, and what does the guest cost you compared to the ones you directly book?
Yeah, so StayVista is a hospitality brand. We have exclusive rights over the property, so all sales are routed through us. We are responsible for distributing it across all platforms, whether it's StayVista's website or whether it's through our contact center, whether it's through our social media, or whether it's through partners like OTAs such as Airbnb, Booking.com, MakeMyTrip, and even offline travel agents who play a critical role in this entire distribution network. So all of these channels are something that we look at maximizing our returns through. We try to give the best rates across all platforms, so the rates will pretty much be the same across all platforms. At the end of the day, as I shared, experience is what wins a guest. So if we are able to build that relationship with that guest, just like an offline travel agent might be, then they stick with us and they keep booking with us.
I think I'll tell you what happens, just building on that. You're right, there will be a section of people who would want to do it. We used to call it shopping. It happens again in every online category. In the browser world, it was easy for you to flip from one browser to the second and a third browser. In the app world...
Because if you're on one browser, you guys get to see the history.
Yes, right. To Puneet's point, not only that...
Is that still the case? Like if I'm on Chrome and I'm scrolling and I've come to your website, I come back the second time around, the price would have changed?
But this browser is shared by every browser.
Not really, not necessarily. By the way, in any case, the browser market has moved to the app market now predominantly, right? So right now, volume-wise, overwhelmingly 75% to 80% of the bookings will happen in the app.
There the switching is not easy.
You give incentive to download the app.
Real estate, download app, absolutely. So that landscape has changed significantly. But that shopping behavior—the other reason why the shopping behavior also changes is if you are a repeat buyer. And that is a function of what experience I have been giving to you, not just pre-sales or booking experience, but also post-sales: what happens when mayhem happens, Middle East crisis happened, what kind of service are we offering, accessibility to customer, and so on. Over a period of time, the trust gets built. It's a lot about providing the experience than just the pricing, to be honest. Of course, there will be segments like domestic air today could be considered as a very price-sensitive market, right? But international is not, because you will also have many options which could be very different.
Don't you end up buying from where you have the highest loyalty points generally?
Depending upon—because you probably are thinking of only one cohort, which is a small percentage of the consumer cohort, right? You're thinking only affluent, affluent perhaps, right? And yes, today you can go to SmartBuy and you have the Infinia card on HDFC, you can buy leveraging your points, right? But guess what? That also is being powered by one of us, right? Right, so...
Other stuff about you that I have in my research: chartered accountant here from Delhi.
Huh? Cricketer? You're a cricketer?
No, not serious. Corporate cricket.
Later in—see, now I'm playing badminton. So I actually like playing sports.
Padel. My son is playing padel.
You look like the naughtier person of the two.
Every hotelier is naughty.
Yeah, every hotelier is naughty. That I don't know. Why is that?
Because they live in that world.
You have to entertain in a way, right? Not in your role, but maybe in the beginning.
No, I call myself chief entertainment officer.
There you go. What is the Plaksha University connection? I like Plaksha University. I think they're doing a great job.
Quite like it, and that is the reason. So this is in Mohali, basically a new-age engineering college, computer science, lot more focused on data science, AI, and so on.
You're a co-founder of that?
No, no. I am not part of the founding team. I've just made a humble beginning, and that happened thanks to a friend who was a co-founder from the founding team when it was set up. But the thought behind that was very simple, Nikhil: to give back, right? So where can you sort of contribute? And you also have to have an interest area, right? So education is one of the interest areas, because both my folks were professors.
Yeah, both your parents. Even we are part of university. I think they're all doing a good job. Not just that, Ashish Dhawan...
Yeah, they're all doing a great job. Something interesting is happening in Mohali.
We actually wanted to go—like I was watching these protests and I thought we should go to these new universities and have a conversation on what is wrong with education.
You would love it because recently there was a convocation. When you see the new batch coming out and all of that, this is like MakeMyTrip, right? It is. Even Ashoka, the focus on liberal arts has done fantastically well. Ashish is a phenomenal guy. Deep is also deeply involved, by the way, with Ashoka.
I think this category of Ashish, Manish Sabharwal, this group of people, they're all interesting to speak to.
And Sanjeev. You were at Info Edge also?
No, I was not at Info Edge, I've just joined the board.
He used to be on our board. What is the thesis now for Info Edge?
I don't know, I'm a board member, I'm an insider, so I can't talk about it. It's just early days for me. But I'm sure they would be thinking more—see, they have two businesses, right? So there's the core business, and they've diversified from the core business, and then they've got the investment business, right? And investment is again the same thesis continuing, right? I'm sure there will be AI focus right now, a lot of investments happening. In the core business, I think it's AI basically, how do you sort of navigate that. Let's say the Naukri business, which is their core traditional business, now the new avatar of Naukri with new products, etc., powered by AI.
Would you like to go next?
I know you're also from Delhi.
Europe, at that time Germany.
Give us a little bit of a trajectory. You grew up in Delhi till what year?
I was in Delhi more or less till the age of 25 and then spent the next 28 years in Europe.
So you started hotel management, joined in the...
'81 to '84. '84 to '89 I started with the government, India Tourism Development Corporation. Most of the time I spent was at the Ashok Hotel, Delhi. And '89 I left and I went to Paris for two years.
What were you doing in Paris?
My master's. At that time there was a program which is still there. It's a business school called ESSEC, one of the five grandes écoles of France, which had a 50/50 tie-up with Cornell from the US, so it was called Cornell-ESSEC. I did my master's there and then went to Germany. Worked in consulting, worked for what is today called Radisson Hotels Worldwide for almost 15 years, and then went on to run a hotel company in Germany for five years.
Hospitality. And then back to where it all started from. Initially declined the offer to become CEO of Taj Hotels in 2013, as at that point I was only one year as CEO, and it's not that easy in Europe to be CEO. Those people are making an exception, they're putting their trust in you. So that was one of the reasons. Second is that family, you know, trying to keep the family together, school, class 12, etc.
This is Ratan Tata era, no? He asked you?
No, he never asked. Actually, there was a lot of talk that he flew specially to talk to me. No, that's not true. It's not true. The only person I met, besides the other board members, was the current chairman of Tata Sons, N. Chandrasekaran. So he's the one who hired me, and it went pretty fast.
And the hotel business was not doing well before you.
Yeah, we almost had 10 years of losses. And...
Would you prefer Taj Hotels or do you prefer IHCL?
I'm the one who started using IHCL. The founder named the company Indian Hotels Company Limited. The name Indian Hotels exists since 125 years because we just did our 125th AGM. But nobody used it because in that new India post-independence until maybe 20 years ago, we still had that spirit of only luxury, only going to our private membership club like Chambers, Taj being the crown jewel of everyone including India, including Tata Group. So you rather use Taj Group, but there was never a company which was called Taj Group. The company's name was always Indian Hotels. So what in my experience it does is it does not allow other brands to stand on their feet. You're always like a second child or a stepchild.
What are the big brands in the group today?
We have almost 14 brands, but the ones which are coming up very strongly are Vivanta, Gateway, and in terms of scale, it's obviously Ginger. But we also have in boutique luxury Claridges Collection, which includes The Claridges in Delhi; the Pune Blue Diamond will be Claridges. It also has the newly acquired brand called Brij, very famous for BrijRama Palace in the holy city of Varanasi. So lots of brands.
amã Stays & Trails homestay business, which is now scaled up almost to 400.
Qmin and amã created during COVID as home delivery, and now Qmin has also become the all-day dining of Ginger. So Ginger sits in a company called Roots Corporation, and both Qmin and Ginger are root vegetables or root spices. So it all just somehow came together. It was not a part of a strategy, but when things happen, they happen.
Can you give us a picture of your life, where you were and how you came up with the idea of starting this company?
So we started Treebo back in 2015. And I have to say I had no business starting this business. I'm a bit of an incidental hotelier. My background is in engineering, MBA, like a lot of other founders. But while I was at McKinsey in my consulting job, I was staying a lot in hotels, so that's the closest I've gotten to hotels in general. But yeah, back in 2015, after a short stint at Myntra, was thinking about what to do next. And travel in general seemed like an exciting space because we could see the income pyramid of the country shifting and it was evident that a lot more people will start traveling than what we had seen in the 10 years before. And therefore, it seemed exciting to build value brands in the travel space, and that's what Treebo was all about.
So it's been over 10 years since Ankit, Pranav, and I started StayVista. At that point, Airbnb was still entering the Indian market. People were not really staying at villas. Villas as a concept was still very new. The people who might have stayed at these would have stayed abroad. But what we saw as an opportunity was that there were beautiful homes that people had made, but they weren't utilizing them. They needed a trusted partner who can take care of the entire hassle of hosting. That's where we come in for a homeowner. And then for a consumer, the entire experience layer—where we offer an entire experience to a guest, whether it's housekeeping services, whether it's spa services, whether it's food, whether it's decor for a celebration—everything is taken care of by us so that when people come together and stay at our homes, they have a fabulous time.
So when I was working, I was really happy. I was working as a head of operations, but there was something missing inside me. And one random day, I thought of taking a solo trip to Rishikesh, and it was back in 2022 wherein solo travel for a woman used to be like a big thing. And I remember booking the bus and my mother crying that, 'Dude, what is happening? Why are you going alone? You have us, you have your friends.' But I was like, 'I want to do this.' And I actually was supposed to go there for three days, but I spent two weeks there, hitchhiked, traveled solo, explored hostels. And when I came back, I realized solo travel is so liberating. You can do whatever you want to do, because when you're with your friends, when you're with your family, you have to also make sure that you are accommodating their needs. But when you're solo, you can do whatever you want to do. And then my co-founder was also working in the same organization, and I pushed him to go to Bali, take a solo trip. He came back and he had the same reaction that, 'Bhavika, I am not traveling with anyone. I'm going to travel solo,' because it was so liberating and I could feel the freedom. And then both of us also took certain community trips wherein there was no filtration. We were in our 20s, and there were people in their 40s. And of course our problems and our things of discussion were different, and their things of discussion were different, and there was no ratio control. And even though the concept was great, we were not coming back with the right sort of people. And that's when we decided to start with something like Boheco, which is an invite-only company. So anybody who wants to join us, they have to request their invite, mention their age, their city, what do they do, and why do they want to travel with us. And then we get on a call with them to understand more, and then we just try to find a common thread between all the people who are joining us. And that is one of the major reasons a lot of people have found their soulmates out of Boheco. We've covered all of that. People have found their business partners; people have found their best of friends out of Boheco. So that is how Boheco came into place, and that was the idea behind it: that we just wanted to make the right sort of people come together and have a great time all together.
My co-founder was an experienced trekker. Me, on the other side, I was working in corporate, I was a software engineer. I would gather my colleagues and we would go trekking in the Western Ghats. So it was two different stories. He would be somebody who would organize treks with his friends in the Himalayas. And Indiahikes was his brainchild, saying despite being blessed with the Himalayas, we don't trek. And during his many treks, he realized that the lack of information is the biggest problem that plagues us. People don't know that these are possible. And that's when he wrote a blog about the Roopkund trek which he had been on. And the blog became very, very popular, and people started to go to Roopkund on their own by referring to the blog. My parallel story was I used to trek in the Western Ghats. I wanted to trek in the Himalayas too, and I was referring to various blogs and resources. I stumbled upon his blog, took inspiration from his blog, and I wanted to organize my own trek to Roopkund. Back then, there were no organizers like Indiahikes where I could go. Basically, you had to either spend a lot of money and you had to have a group of your own, because going as one or two people was impossible to the Himalayas. And I, in the quest of making my own group to go to the Himalayas following that blog, went and placed a comment on his blog saying, 'I'm forming a group. Would anybody like to join me?' And that's when Arjun wrote back to me saying, 'I am doing this. We are launching a small thing called Indiahikes. Would you want to be a part of that group?' That's where I said, 'Yes, why not? I'm referring to your blog. If I get to go with you, that's great.' And that trek happened to be the very first trek of Indiahikes. Over the trek, the impact the trek had on me, the impact the trek had on my fellow trekkers—I just stayed in touch with Arjun. I did not want to let that world go despite being a software engineer, and I started helping him in publicizing Indiahikes, publicizing the Roopkund trek, designing the trek for the next season. So I was an integral part of the next season of the trek that happened. Our association continued like this for about seven to eight months, and that's when he said, 'Okay, I think you should take a call if perhaps you want to just switch over from your software work to come into Indiahikes, be with me, and let us grow this, because we have an opportunity here.'
How big are the two companies for scale? I know you're listed so you can talk about the numbers.
Well, MakeMyTrip, gross booking value last year, full last year reported, is about $11 billion. And gross take rate is about, let's say—the revenue line for us is about 10% to 10.5%, so over a billion dollars.
So actual revenue is over a billion dollars. And on the profitability front?
Our adjusted EBITDA number—adjustment is only share-based compensation—is 1.7% of the gross booking number, which is roughly $170 million.
And IHCL reported its results for the last financial year at almost 10,000 crore in revenue and 2,000 crore plus as profit after tax. So very similar sizes, both companies are.
No, but we are more efficient, more profitable, and better market cap.
How big is this AI thing?
I think in our world, it's huge.
Are you seeing it change already?
Like if I am going to MMT's website and looking for a hotel today, are people already going to ChatGPT and saying, 'Find me the cheapest price on next hotel'?
Not as much. We are also on ChatGPT. We actually have—and they have a feature called @MakeMyTrip. You can bring in your brand and you can have your own native experience. We are not getting too much traffic coming in from there. It's taking time.
Why would you allow ChatGPT to scrape your data? Can't you block that?
But you end up still doing it.
On the internet, they end up still doing it. You will obviously do whatever you can do to block it, but what you do end up protecting is deep data, deep in the funnel. And those layers, there can be multi-layer security that you can build that can do it. Superficial data, it is already in any case public. So what data matters, Nikhil, in this business is not necessarily that super top layer data.
Top layer is price, availability.
Availability, price, just the description of the product.
Under it is user-related data, right? Traffic, and you have your customer data, the preferences of consumers, right? Right, because let's say Nikhil has been coming to our platform and what he has been buying over a period of time, different products. Let's say if you were buying a product, you were going with a group, you were buying a homestay, or you were buying a hotel—which kind of hotel were you buying? And even the funnel drop-off data, like how much time are you spending? Are you a looker or are you a booker? Are you a serious traveler, high-intent traveler, or a low-intent traveler?
So if you incorporate AI in your company, you will not use these LLMs from...
No, not necessarily, not all of it.
I'm asking, you won't run an open-source model of your own and try to put your data in that?
So I'll tell you. See, right now what we are doing, and it's an evolution which I believe will happen: early days, because these frontier models were very, very strong, so you end up using multiple frontier models...
All of them: Gemini, Claude, Cursor, GPT. But the grounding of that will happen with our proprietary data. That data doesn't go anywhere, like user reviews, for example, that only belongs to us.
When you say grounding, what do you mean?
Just to make sure that the accuracy and the relevance of the responses to the customer is far more accurate than generic.
After the model generates something, you're checking on your end if it's right.
That is correct. So our own data is also intelligence.
Why don't you run your own model on your own data?
You could potentially do it, right? But it's just a matter of—I don't know whether we will sort of evolve into that also or not. See, right now what is happening is, because of let's say the cost pressure, because if you continue to continuously keep using big LLMs, then of course the token cost is prohibitive, right? But then there is now...
And they might replicate your business model like they're doing in many cases.
I'll tell you the reason why I don't think that replication is so easy in a deep transaction business versus a generic search business. Think about Google, for example. So Google historically has always been perceived as potential competition threat also, but they could never go deep into the funnel. What I mean by deep into the funnel is...
But Google never tried. If Google...
They tried, but superficially. They've been selling traffic to us, right, to every online platform.
Only selling traffic. But they never tried to build a business online.
That is what I'm saying. But these models... No, models are also very different. So think about it like...
Anthropic is starting financial services.
Yeah, but let's say travel services. You think about payment pages, like 20 payment options with multiple credit card alliances. You will have to do all of that, right? You can't scrape and do it. You cannot pick it up from everywhere and say, 'Okay, here's the best option.' And then fulfillment, then the after-sale experience: where would you go? You're not going to take customer calls or take customer queries to service those customers, right? So that fulfillment—and that's true for product commerce also, like for Amazon and Flipkart—is very hard. It is not easy to build that, because that is where the heavy lifting has happened over a period.
Flipkart tried. They bought this company in travel, right? Cleartrip.
Yeah, Cleartrip. But they are running Cleartrip independently.
First they were doing travel within Flipkart, but then they saw this opportunity.
That's diversification, that's completely different. But you're running it as a vertical OTA.
So AI is more an enabler than a disruptor of our business, because AI will help us streamline a lot of our operations. I also look at our business as something which is AI-proof, because with the amount of interaction with digital media as well as AI and technology that's taking place in people's lives, people want something that feels real. People want real human connections. And holidays, especially getaways with your group, give you an opportunity to really disconnect from that entire social tech bubble to being in a very real, personalized environment.
It's a favorite hobby for all business leaders to believe and to claim that their business will not get negatively impacted by AI, and I'll pretend to do that as well. But look, I think it is of course without dispute the most powerful technology revolution that we have seen at least in my lifetime, and it is evolving at such a rapid pace that I would never say never in terms of what it can or cannot do going forward.
It doesn't matter to you now?
No, it does matter. I think...
Like do you care if your booking is happening via MMT or via ChatGPT?
No, that doesn't matter as much. But you could use AI sitting on top of your revenue management system to optimize the level of revenue. That's internally.
Not from a sales model of finding the client.
No, I think more important is the back of house. So the problem about AI and all these customer data is suppose we are having coffee like right now, but I go off coffee and I start drinking tea, no matter which hotel I'll go to, they'll put coffee for you. And you also get carried away, or you like drinking beer or gin and suddenly you switch to something else, and then they'll still keep bringing that because that's what the data says.
The pattern, yes. How much data do you capture at the hotel?
A lot. A lot of data is captured, yeah.
I remember once in this hotel in Paris, La Réserve or something like that, it was a nice boutique hotel. They would remember what...
La Réserve is more like the Starbucks coffee thing.
La Réserve is this old Napoleon house converted into a hotel or something like that in Paris. It's like a tiny chain. But they would remember as much as how I had my eggs on my last trip there and what I ate with my eggs, and the next time they would remember and serve me exactly that. Do you think for a hotel business like yours it would make sense to capture that much data?
I don't think so. Especially for us in India, the service is from the heart. That's our Asian hospitality. We should not mechanize it so much. And we have so many cuisines. If I have had a dosa for breakfast and maybe I want an omelette tomorrow, and if I have a three-night stay, maybe the third...
day I want puri bhaji or something. So it's very different. I think that's the challenge also, to fit that in. If you look at the breakfast buffets in India, they are massive versus anywhere in the world. Anywhere, I have not—
And what all do you capture data-wise?
We capture, you know, the customer's preferences, the way they book, from preferences of meals, preferences of—
You mean like veg/non-veg?
Veg/non-veg, also everything gets captured in that form.
Like if I came to Taj in Land's End, which is right next door, and I ordered biryani 6 months ago, if I come back, you will know that I ordered biryani 6 months ago?
Yes and no. It depends who's capturing that data. So sometimes you do and sometimes you don't. That is, as I said, it's not very processed. It's from the heart. So if the chef is coming, and especially Land's End had this wonderful chef of ours who's now moved to Mahal Palace in Colaba, he will come to you, say, "Sir..." He has this very special art of doing it. Then no matter what you wanted to eat, you really actually go with what the chef is recommending you to eat—
And saying, "I made it specially for you." But that's the very Indian way of hospitality, which is great because it differentiates you from the rest of the world, and we should keep that.
But if you want to incorporate more tech in hospitality, you'll need to capture more data, right?
We do. But there are many other uses of data. For example, today we have getting close to 700 hotels, which means at least 500-plus contracts, assuming that some of the contracts are for multi-use properties. How do you get a contract summary? So you can use a lot of that data and AI to generate, you know, basic contract summaries, which you can teach your general managers how they should study their own contract. So I think that part is very important.
As an example of non-customer facing, which is internal, it simplifies your processes. There's a professional element in AI that can simplify the way you work, the way you capture data from customers. And there is a business element in which your speed of getting a job done improves. You know, if you're not good at writing English letters, you can have ChatGPT do it for you. So I've seen a lot of our people—what happened, you know, and you can make out actually when the letter comes to you, you can make out this is written by ChatGPT or an individual.
They don't appreciate it, right, when it's written by—
You have to still use a bit of your own common sense and tweak it a bit so it looks like your own.
Right. I was in China, and in a lot of hotels, I was seeing these robots—
Which were doing service. You tried it at Ginger.
We have one in the Ginger Mumbai airport that goes around.
What is the response to that?
It's more like fun, what I said, the fun element. But does it replace any jobs? The answer is no. Actually, should we be doing it? My answer would be no. It's not very socially responsible. We have a young demographic population to our advantage. So either we get the robots to help people find jobs, or we should not replace human beings with robots. We'll also lose our service. It's okay if the population is old and there are no people available to serve, you know, that they—
Won't somebody else do it, and the margins will be higher for them?
Because you don't have to pay the robot a salary.
No. Till date, it has not happened. It's like, as much as 1-800 numbers, "Call this toll-free number" in the US—you don't get anything since the last 30 years without calling a toll-free number. In India, it never happens, you know.
This physical AI—interesting you mentioned China. And you've done in-laws, so you know US, because he's very bullish about robotic AI as well, or physical AI as well. See, China is showing the scale on that, at least in the manufacturing side and various other places, in fact including hotels potentially. You will replace kiosks at many places with robots, right? Because the first level of automation was also kiosks, right? In the airports, you will see kiosks—
Self-service kiosks, right.
And that's one machine getting replaced by another machine, so that could be one of the use cases.
So Puneet, what seems to be happening in China is that there it is catching fire literally.
Not just in service, there it's catching on in a bunch of things. We went to this company called Sharpa—
Which makes the wrist with 18 joints.
It has so much dexterity that it's able to take a deck of cards, pick one.
It can play table tennis and beat you.
There was a company which had an automated kitchen, like a robot in a 300-foot kitchen who's able to start to finish cook everything at scale.
This also brings standardization that is very hard to bring with a human being.
Yeah. See, we have our flight kitchen business, which is Taj SATS. SATS is, of course, the one that runs the Singapore airport also. We have the capability of doing, I don't know, hundreds of tons of basmati rice cooked differently with just two people. Everything else is done by the machine, including the cleaning of the rice, the cooking of the rice, getting it packed with the cutlery, etc. So it depends what job that you're trying to do. When I talk about our sector, hospitality, the human hospitality is very difficult to replace by the robots.
What about Ginger and budget?
Ginger and all can happen. Yeah, that is not, you know, that is more cookie-cutter. So the very—
It will likely happen. It is happening as we speak.
It's happening, but definitely not upscale, upper upscale, and luxury. See, if you go to a wedding, you'll have only robots serving you? That's not going to happen.
I'm surprised how much they spoke about this segment. It feels like the whole episode was on this. Look, you know, there is this visual of, of course, a robot delivering stuff in a hotel and moving around a hotel, which no doubt has caught everyone's fancy over the last many years, and it is still yet to be fully rolled out. And I'm sure it'll happen again. It's one of those things where I'm adequately paranoid about what will or will not happen in the future without pretending to be smart enough to predict that future.
I 100% would look—I mean, I would always bet with technology's progress, not against it ever. All that I'm trying to say is the shape and form that it will take. For example, to even say it'll be a humanoid, which is a very specific term, I don't know, right? I mean, for me, any kind of friction—I mean, I would assume safely that, you know, no customer would ever say that, okay, in the name of a human touch, in the name of a great experience, I would want to deal with more humans necessarily, at least not in most facets of their hotel experience, right?
So for sure, there would be a role for robots to play in, let's say, I don't know, cleaning the room, in bringing stuff to your room, in helping you with check-ins, checkouts, payments, etc. Now what shape and form does that robot take, or whether it is even a robot or not, is not something I would kind of place a bet on today. But I certainly think, like, we have developed, for example, in Medallio, the closest that we could have gotten to the DigiYatra experience in hotels, where for sure you could go check in, stay for a few days, check out of a hotel without even interacting with a human. And I'm sure there will be more of that coming.
So I'm not in a position to say the layer above that will be humans or the layer below will be humans, etc. It'll be interesting to see how this very intangible, soft aspect of human personality evolves in terms of how they see hotels. You know, do they see hotels as places they stay at, maybe in our segment for sure, while they explore the city, such that the place should be just super efficient, does not matter what human interactions they have there or not—maybe the lesser the better—versus maybe if they are staying in a luxury resort somewhere where they would love their pampering, they would love their spa experience, where they would love to have a butler looking after them all the time and so on. So how that expectation of hotels evolves, we'll see. It's probably part of the evolution of human psyche while traveling. But for sure, I would certainly bet in favor of eliminating friction and not leaning on the human touch to keep it. I don't think any customer would welcome that.
Say in 5 years from now, how will MMT and IHCL change by virtue of AI, both physical and digital?
I'll tell you. See, first, the consumer-facing, right? Because over the last 25 years, it has also been evolving. First, the device preference changed from desktop browser to mobile app and so on, and people got used to it. And now I think the future is likely to be conversational interfaces, right? Which is what we have started building, to your earlier question on GPT, etc. See, one part of the thing is that because we have rich data, you also start leveraging AI and build that interface because it's conversational.
Ironically, and I've started giving this example at many places: now think about it. The shift earlier happened from human touch, where traditionally people will call the travel agent, right, because "I want to talk to someone," moved from human interaction to self-service. The internet, all e-commerce businesses are self-service. You come on this thing, it's very convenient, you can choose what you like of your choice, and you can do it at a quick speed right there with the sheer convenience of doing it, right? Just at the click of a button, I don't have to interact with anyone. And now with AI, it is going back to conversation.
So you will build an MMT interface which is voice-first?
It's happening. So I'll tell you, about 80,000 to 90,000 daily conversations are happening today.
Has it gone like massively viral? And these guys are using what, like a Whisper Flow sitting on top of it, or is it your voice model based on—
A lot of it is, by the way, 20-25% in voice, and also about 25% traffic is coming from—
You've tied up with a Whisper Flow or ElevenLabs or somebody, and their voice bot is sitting on top of it?
That's correct. Multiple models used with our own data, and then we have the feature on Myra, right? So now it is giving you an opportunity to have a conversation again. So if we see from the context of travel and tourism industry and see the opportunity side of it, because the other very important point which gets missed out is going to be consumer adoption, by the way, because it takes time, you know? And we end up sort of sometimes just generalizing, for lack of a better word, that let's say even for personalization, but tend to sometimes forget about the mix of the consumers that you'll have, right, in a country like India. All kinds of segments that you'll have: some will have language preference, some will not be as savvy of technology as the others would be, etc., etc., right?
So consumer adoption notwithstanding, because that's going to be a journey in my view, but the opportunity is going to be—now think about Tier 3, Tier 4, the gap that we have on internet penetration and e-commerce penetration. Today, internet penetration is 900 million-plus, maybe a billion already, and the online buying is about 250 to 300 million depending upon all told, also by and large. So I think there is a clear opportunity for a discretionary product like ours of another 200 million. Right now, they're not necessarily buying online for many reasons, but one of them is that "I have inhibition, I have inertia because of the language, and I'm overwhelmed when I come to the funnel, there's too much to deal with." Now I can just go on Myra and start having a conversation, whether it is Hindi or English or Kannada or—
I think what you're saying and what he's saying is the same thing. You're saying that premium will be human-like, handmade—
But everything budget and affordable will become more AI.
I'll tell you what. Even in premium—I'll give an example: Hotel President in Mumbai, try that. You have—I mean, you're talking to a machine booking a table, but you don't get to know till almost the conversation is going to end. It's done very well, we are getting more orders, and that's where humans get replaced. But I doubt if in the premium, you'll have machines coming and serving you.
It'll be human with a machine.
Yeah, it will be a human with a machine.
But services will become more niche, like the difference between a mass premium and an ultra premium will be completely different, where one will require a completely different kind of answer and another will require a completely different kind of answer.
Yeah, I think so. And I think maybe we are 5-10 years away from that also happening in India, or this big change. But it's like anything, 20 years ago, if you went to a Japanese place and wanted to have sushi, it was already something which was rolling out, you just pick it up, right, what you wanted, and then you pay through the machine. Or you go and buy any clothes anywhere today in any advanced country, you just put them in a thing, it automatically gets charged. So all that will happen, but in the service sector, I think it will take time, because you just don't pay for the product, you also pay a premium for the service that you are being provided—
Or the human touch. So if Google owned discovery of hotels or flight tickets or whatever, and then MMT came and sat on top of that, in the next leg of the cycle with AI, is it MMT on AI, or is it something which is AI native?
No, I think it's going to be an independent vertical and solving end-to-end funnel. So let me give you an example.
Can't the hotel become that itself?
It can do, absolutely. It's a question of investment.
Can have discovery on AI.
Fundamentally, it will be a question of core versus non-core, building capabilities, and investing behind it.
Like if we were to be talking to say somebody who's 25 years old looking to start a business in this sector, what layer do you think he should focus on that will get created, and what layer will get disrupted? What should he do? Where is the opportunity? Say Google became MMT, MMT is now becoming a funnel on AI, the hotel itself can be on AI tomorrow where it becomes its own.
It'll be a direct function of what business model that he wants to have.
So in the tech world, let's say the distribution layer, the discovery down to actual booking, which is effectively the channel, right? Because my view is, now the discovery that was not necessarily 100% solved by verticals like us will also get solved because we will have an opportunity to build the mouth of the funnel directly. Now, like today also, we have 75% of the traffic coming directly on us, and that comes in with the trust built over a period of time on the brand. I don't really need to go to Google even today, right? So I don't think Google is solving for 100% of the discovery today; it's solving for 20% of the discovery today, right? So some unique cases or whatever. And even Google is getting disrupted because now AI is disrupting their business first, right? Because with the AI Overview, this legacy SEM/SEO is going to go through a change, right?
So the way to think about this will be, let's say if you make a choice between generic search business with monetization model coming from traffic—that I build content, it's a content business, keep building content, right? And you are a very content-heavy business powered by AI, build all kind of intelligence to build the relevance for the customer, answer every possible query, and then because I have a ton of traffic, I will monetize that traffic. And monetization of that traffic will happen with the businesses only, because businesses will come and advertise on them, right? Or you are thinking about a business vertical, a category vertical which is let's say travel tech, right? Which is like online distribution or online travel agency as a model.
So what is the opportunity, if you have to summarize? I'm asking you as a 25-year-old, I want to build between these layers, what should I build and which layer should I not build?
If you ask me, if you look at all the ecosystem together, including the supply side, the real opportunity is to bring in tech layers on the supply side, the level of digitization.
How do I bring the tech layer on top of supply?
Like he was alluding to, one part of it is revenue management. Now IHCL will be doing revenue management because you have to sell from a distribution—
Is that opportunity or discovery of the hotel is the opportunity, paying 12 to 15% over there as margin?
That will be, Nikhil, it's a function of economics. Even today, there is every brand will be doing direct, right? It is a function of two things: one is a function of what is going to be your cost of customer acquisition doing it directly versus you doing it with let's say a player like us, right? The second is going to be the customer choice, because our platform is going to be comprehensive, multiple choices, because customers would want to see all the time a selection of products before you buy one, right? So I think both will coexist. Even today, the direct business also happens on IHCL and the distribution business also happens, and even the offline business, believe it or not, happens.
I have this question for you, Puneet. Say Zomato, for restaurants, the margins that they charge are so high, and you'll have a view on it because of being on the Info Edge board. I see at some point soon the restaurant himself will want to be discovered directly and build direct relationships and omit the middleman in a way. At your scale, the number of hotels and rooms you have to service, at what point will you be like, okay, I'll take my inventory out of all these discovery sites and manage it myself, because at this scale people have to come to me?
So two things: first, I want to go back to something you asked as a 25-year-old. I would tell the 25-year-old: there's enough platforms, there are enough people working on AI, there's a lot of competitor overcrowding. Don't go there. Start a boutique hotel business or start a very nice, clean budget hotel business, and you will have a lot of success.
Yeah, yeah. You could do thousands of hotels in India.
I 100% think so. In fact, I would say that advice is more right today than it would have probably been 11 years ago when we actually started this, because the timing is just so ripe in terms of where our income pyramid is, what's happening to the middle-income segment of the country, what's happening to people's aspirations to travel fueled by a lot of things, but of course importantly so with their own incomes growing to a level where they can afford travel. And we've seen this in the examples of pretty much all developed countries, whether the usual suspects of a US, a China, where when the demographic started to reach, when the macroeconomy started to reach a certain level, it unlocks affordable travel because there are just so many more people which create the demand pull for those kind of offerings. So yeah, 100%, I think that's the right advice today.
So many things that I would want to get built out in this entire ecosystem. Being early movers in this ecosystem, honestly we've had to put in a lot of effort in building each and every layer out, just like a Flipkart or Amazon when they started, they had to build out every rail in the e-commerce ecosystem. So whether it's finding good technicians in locations such as Coorg or in Alibaug, whether it's finding good cooks in these locations, whether it's taking care of the facility management of these villas or even building these villas, we've had to find relevant folks to make this happen.
We'd love entrepreneurs who can build entire businesses in each of these verticals. Whether it's someone who becomes a caterer in Goa, or whether it's a caterer in Manali, or whether it's a great baker who can deliver cakes to us in a location such as Ooty. In each of these locations, I think there's an opportunity for a lot of entrepreneurs to get created that can deliver services, whether it's someone who's delivering hikes to take people on hikes in a location such as Kasauli. So what I'm trying to touch on is that there are so many different layers that come together, or services that come together to give a great experience, and I think for each of them we would love to see more and more entrepreneurs come up and build.
If you look at Motel One in Germany, you look at Ibis in France, or Formule 1, you look at Premier Inn in the UK, you look at Travelodge in the UK, look at Hampton Inn in the US, and Country Inn, Comfort Inn—there are so many brands. And look at the population of India and the amount of supply we have in this segment.
But affordability is also lesser, no?
The affordability is less, but it's increasing every day. So when you start thinking of it today, by the time you build, the affordability factor will come.
Like as a sector, out of India's GDP, let's say the GDP is 4 trillion, tourism direct and indirect, all of it put together is only about 6%, 200 billion, which compared to say the West, when you're comparing to the US, is a significantly smaller number. So that means it'll only go up, right? If India is going to be 30 trillion instead of 4, then if 10% is coming from tourism, which is 3 trillion, and 80% of it is domestic, that's how it will work.
But if you're growing at 6% or 7%, the number of years of compounding required to get to 30 is by the time the youngster's kids are dead.
So that is the opportunity, because a lot of tourism today is in the unorganized sector, so that doesn't get counted. Your Dal Lake shikara-wala, the rickshaw-wala from the ghat to Kashi Vishwanath Temple, those people who are selling stuff to the tourists coming from Switzerland or Germany or Scandinavia—this will get eventually organized and those numbers change. At the moment, we are saying 6 because you are not able to capture the unorganized number.
Like these tourists coming from outside, the number for India is 20 million.
So 10 million is actual foreigners coming into India. Like UAE gets 30 million, Paris gets 25—
Gets 100 million. Correct.
But there is a different reason. Infrastructure—
Infrastructure, the potential is there.
Infrastructure improvement is the opportunity area.
But you know, I just wanted to add one variant to what Puneet was saying earlier on that opportunity. India is, by the way, an acute short supply market. Compare it with anyone. Whichever report that you see, it's anywhere between 1.5 to 1.67 million rooms. Pick up any two big cities, they will have that many numbers. Singapore together has as many rooms as the whole of India. So that's the one data point.
The second one is also the non-standardization, when we were talking about it in the beginning before we started. The opportunity of the mid-segment hotels, the one that you were talking about or the one Puneet was talking about earlier, which can give a better quality experience, the opportunity is huge. Bloomchain, for example, right? It's a good example of that hotel. All what they have tried to do is to reposition that accommodation differently.
We did that with Ginger too.
Ginger went from budget to lean luxury.
Absolutely, lean luxury. Right. So that's like a great sort of term to put in. Right. So if you look at it from a supply standpoint, there is a ton of opportunity because today in season, when you have peak seasons or long weekends, you will be short on inventory and therefore people would want to go out, one reason. The second one will be because the prices go up, right?
If you're short of inventory like you're saying, why is the occupancy not 100%?
Yeah, but because when we measure occupancy—and he will be the expert—but when we measure occupancy, we look at it 365 days.
You should look at occupancy when it is peak season.
But I can't build a business model based on peak, right? Not necessarily. And also India is a tropical country, there are extreme weather conditions. So when it's very hot, people stay inside, nobody from outside comes. And when it's monsoon, it's monsoon. There is a certain segment which comes to India only in the monsoon, especially from the Middle East. They sit in the hotel rooms and just keep looking at the rains. I mean, they are fascinated.
But why is this number so low? Like you said, infrastructure, when we spoke earlier, only 10 million for a country with as much culture and history and culinary stuff.
You can have the best of the culture in the world, you can have the best of monuments—
Yeah, 45 UNESCO sites. But we have to tell the world, "We have this. Please come and see."
You think it's a marketing problem?
It's a marketing problem.
Do you think government is not spending on marketing?
I think it has been the case. That's what we have been lobbying for.
Yeah, we've been lobbying for—see, Incredible India has not really happened for a while. That was the last campaign. But even before marketing, if you think about it, to my mind, that might be relatively the easier part, because if you decide to invest in marketing, you'll invest and you will do a good job of it. I think before that, let's talk about these UNESCO sites: the on-ground experience is the issue. Is that world-class, right? Starting from literally basic things, right? Starting from washrooms, the loos, the parking facilities, the crowd management, the queue management, and accessibility.
What happens if the government privatizes all this?
I think it'll do a world of good, and there are examples.
We do wherever we can. We do it as part of CSR. But almost all responsible companies, not just us, clean their beaches, clean the roads to the monuments. They don't necessarily rely on the government. So all the beaches you see in Goa where there is a Taj, they're cleaned by us.
Let's say we want to make the number of incoming foreign tourists go from 10 million to 100 million. Say you were to be the Prime Minister of India for 5 years—I'll ask both of you this question—what are three things you would change to make that happen? Puneet is Indian Prime Minister for 5 years.
Indian Prime Minister, it can be construed—
Hypothetically, let's say you're part of a tourism board driving this.
Number one is the positioning of the sector. So we have to understand that tourism creates the strength of brand India across the globe. It gives you that soft power of negotiating on anything because people know you and respect you for everything that you have historically, but today they don't know us that way, right? The second thing it does is helps you get investment from outside. That means if you grant certain status which has been taken away from this sector, like infrastructure status or within the states industry status so that it can compete with other sectors. Now every sector might want that, but many sectors have it and many don't have it. So if it's a part of your agenda, you have to do the positioning of tourism as an infra and as an industry.
Okay, point is marketing India. I'm just going to write it down. Point number one was tourism should get infrastructure status.
Okay. Which actually basically gets you cheaper loans and longer moratoriums because it's a labor-intensive and capital-intensive sector. Same, I would say 1A and 1B is: 1A is infrastructure, and 1B would be industry status within the states so that your cost of utilities and everything else is not taxed at the highest level, but as per any other commercial building is fine.
The second is last-mile connectivity to all these monuments. So we have the beautiful airports today thanks to all the spending of the government on highways and trains and airports, but the last mile something is always missing, right?
Example is, you know, you can come to a beautiful train station with the Vande Bharat, but getting out of the platform and to the road and into the taxi is not a seamless experience as the platform.
So whether it's because of population or it's because of education or because of whatever that behavior is, I mean, by the time a flight lands, and if it's an all-economy flight, the dhakkam-dhukki you have to get out, and if you're on an aisle seat, the number of rucksacks that hit you is—you know, there are certain things which are a hindrance to—
How does the government solve that?
The government cannot solve that. That is education. That will be a natural transition as the nation grows, the prosperity grows, just like airline traffic has grown. All this will also grow. This the government can't do.
